4 posts tagged “birds”
I think I'd feel better with an acorn woodpecker around. These guys are loud! Loud, loud, loud, and they look like cartoon birds. They are all over campus.
Like most woodpeckers, they are wholly adorable, and they cache acorns in acorn matrices of their own design. Image from wikipedia.
My little digital camera isn't much good for birding: to get a really good photo I'd probably have to set the timer and embed it in a block of suet in the backyard. For the most part this is all right, because my schedule and daily habits aren't much good for birding either. But occasionally unusual things happen, like the arrival of a flock of cedar waxwings in the backyard. I got up this morning and saw a few of them near the fig tree through the kitchen window, but before I'd gotten to the end of wondering if I should go get the— , they had flown off. Unsurprising. But they came back an hour later in greater numbers and I decided, even after certain people had mocked me for my series of "photos of little faraway blurry birds in Europe," to try to capture the event. And lo, in a couple of these pictures, you can even maybe see distinguishing features! (Images may also contain sparrows, towhees, and other common backyard denizens.)
I'm still unable to give a proper definition in my research paper, but the Google results for gnoseology made me pretty happy. Being momentarily face-to-face with a gilded flicker also made me pretty happy. So you probably think that, overall, I'm pretty happy, but I'm not sure. Sleepiness is interfering with my ability to monitor these things. And I've been having epically ridiculous paper-writing adventures, which are not yet over, for reasons surely connected to my tendency to pick paper topics like "use of figurative language in Romantic poetry, and its relation to consciousness and history."
I'm in the middle of some sort of ugly intellectual block — none of my thoughts seem to converge anywhere, I can't read anything for long, and every recent attempt at posting has ended in failure. What does this mean? It means you all get to contemplate bird-friendly coffee.
Sure, you understand in the abstract that coffee plantations form an important part of migratory bird habitat, and that shade-grown coffee is ecologically superior to the sun-grown sort. But do you perceive the happiness and befriendedness of this oriole? (I think it's an oriole.) In the coffee plant? The oriole in the coffee plant? What if the plant had no orioles? Total crushing depression. Terrible state of affairs. Six hundred unread books in the house and an unfinished thesis. Oh dear. Buy shade-grown coffee! The ecological health of several continents is at stake! Please.
It is really time for bed.
